idea of it. Thanks to her, flowers were now growing all over the place—even in places where they did not belong, such as on the branches of trees. Longregard would spend hours gazing at them with a vaguely troubled air about her, difficult to put into words but easy enough to convey through a bridging of auras: the flowers, though beautiful, were somehow lonely, and could be bettered if they were aswarm with tiny souls-that-were-not-quite-souls. These would fly about on small wings and visit the flowers and fill the air with a faint hum.
Once Egdod had this idea in his mind he could not rest until he had learned the knack of making such things and bringing them into existence. He would toil on it in the Garden until the beauty and fragrance of the lonely flowers became a distraction, and then he would fly away to the Fastness, where he could try to draw it forth from chaos. He put a somewhat ill-formed picture of it into the mind of Thingor, who tried to fashion wings from new materials he had learned the art of making, such as metal and glass. The wings were beautiful and seemed to capture some of what was wanted, but they could not fly of their own accord. For that, an animating force was required, and making any such thing was beyond Egdod’s powers. When he returned from the Fastness he would carry Thingor’s latest creations with him and place them in the Garden, where the cold winter sun would glint in the glass and shine on the polished metal veins that held it in place, but no matter how small and delicate he made them, they would not move.
One day Egdod was sitting next to a flower bed examining a pair of glass and metal wings so small that they barely stretched over the width of a fingertip when he sensed the approach of another soul, and looked up to see Longregard gazing at him. “Come down into the Forest,” she said, “things are stirring in it to which you would do well to pay heed.”
Egdod was aware that Longregard had lately shifted her attention from goings-on in Town to the Forest that sloped away from the Palace on its opposite side. He did not know what about it had drawn her eye. The snow was melting, as it had done every year since it had first dissolved into freshets and rills and creeks to make the first river. Plants were sprouting from the bare ground between the trees; many of these had, over the years, spread down the hill from the Garden, so they were of more various kinds here than anywhere else in the Land. As such the place would naturally be of interest to Longregard, the steady and patient observer. But many things were of interest to her that she did not bring to Egdod’s attention. She was a solitary soul who did not lightly interrupt others. So Egdod now rose and walked with Longregard out the back gate of the Garden. They entered into the budding trees and walked among the sprouting green things toward a place that Egdod knew well, since it was uppermost of all, where water erupted from the ground; it was the headwater of the first stream that Egdod, many years ago, had discovered at the melting of the first snow. By ranging far afield and following all of the river’s tributaries to their sources, he could find others of its kind, high up in mountains. Some were at greater elevation or produced a larger flow. But in Egdod’s mind this place, which he called the spring, was nonetheless the place where the river began. It was in the trickle of its water that he had first heard his name pronounced, and known what to call himself.
Very early—perhaps even before Egdod had become aware of Ward—a soul had taken up residence in the spring. As he now approached it with Longregard, he sensed that many of the trees that had grown up around the spring had also become the homes of souls. The presence of one attracted more. The water in the ground made the trees grow strongly; they were taller and more elaborately developed here than anywhere else in the Land. The word “grove” came to him and he sensed that in its oldness, the size of its trees, and the number of souls present here, it was different from every other place. In